


the silence that follows

by godtrashed



Series: emerge, transformed [1]
Category: Law Abiding Citizen (Polygon), Polygon/McElroy Vlogs & Podcasts RPF
Genre: Gen, Missing Scene, Pre-Relationship, narrative purgatory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-10
Updated: 2017-08-10
Packaged: 2018-12-13 17:38:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,553
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11764992
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/godtrashed/pseuds/godtrashed
Summary: Russ, and a handful of moments from an in-between time.





	the silence that follows

**Author's Note:**

> this is a fic about being in limbo between two significant moments in a narrative. it was... not _not_ written so i could process my anxiety re: everything that went down with nick. i hope everyone out here is doing okay.
> 
> the 'graphic depictions of violence' tag is maybe overcautious, but russ does think a lot about shooting some guys. i'm still working on another lac fic that's a follow-up to the last one. watch this space.

Russ comes back to life in excruciating pain. He doesn’t move for a long time. His whole body feels like it’s splintered apart; it’s the kind of hurt you can’t do anything but live with, until it’s just part of life, until it feels like it belongs to someone else. There’s a fine mist of rain falling on Los Santos. It’s soft on his face, cooling his skin as sunspots burst behind his eyelids.

There’s no voice.

Maybe it was just a dream after all. Russ’s dreams get weird sometimes. Sure, a dream about becoming a taco salesman and then murdering several guys at the behest of a disembodied weirdo with a really soothing voice is next-level even for him, but there has to be an outlet somewhere, surely. A pressure valve. He’s _thought_ about shooting up smokers before, when they stand underneath the office window and personally deliver their garbage air straight into his cubicle. It’s probably just that -- more thoughts, things he’d never actually do, because he’s a good and scrupulous person and any urges he might have are firmly under control.

Cautiously, he opens his eyes. There’s no blood, which is a nice surprise. By all accounts there are no bones broken, either. He’s just… sort of under a tree, in a park he doesn’t recognise, which is weird primarily because the dream ended when he fell into a tree from a helicopter. And -- he checks his watch -- because it’s 3pm and he’s nowhere near his office. 

“Voice?” he asks; his voice cracks, and nobody replies.

He limps back to the city centre, the world a heat-hazy mess of strangers and lights. Los Santos is not a polite place to live. It’s loud and dirty and abrasive, the kind of city where a guy like Russ slips straight under the radar. Sirens are nothing new. Getting body-checked by a stranger in a hurry is nothing new. It’s going to be all right, Russ tells himself, and keeps walking. He’s overworked, or something. He’s feverish, maybe. He’s going to go back to his apartment and do last night’s dishes and finish the insurance claim on the car he doesn’t have anymore. He’s going to sleep for real. This doesn’t need to be a whole big thing. The puddles on the sidewalk are seeping in through the cracks in the soles of his shoes.

The sirens are getting louder. There’s hazard tape across the intersection, yellow and black and garish through the drizzling rain. Beyond the hazard tape, there’s -- not smoke, not quite, but an ashy grey haze, hanging in the air like a ghost over a blackened, twisted metal skeleton. Russ picks his way closer, mumbles _excuse me_ as he squeezes between two guys in suits taking up the whole sidewalk. There are cops everywhere, ambulances parked all down the block. Broken glass. It’s a helicopter. It _was_ a helicopter. Russ’s whole body is nothing but the memory of snapping back to reality like waking up from a dream; of some strange mechanistic shift in the configuration of his brain; of stepping out of the cockpit into thin air, and falling.

* * *

He goes into work the next morning, except it quickly emerges that he needn’t have bothered. He’s called into the manager’s office before he can even log into his computer; ten minutes later he’s gathering his belongings into a cardboard box, potted plant and stationery and chipped, coffee-stained mug. “I don’t know what to tell you,” says his boss, who looks about as exhausted as Russ feels, except his suit fits much better and his shoes are really smart. “You miss a day of work -- no notice, no nothing -- you gotta figure it’s not worth showing up in the morning, surely.” Russ kicks a pebble on the sidewalk out front, watches it hop-skip-jump over the cracks in the asphalt.

He carries the box home. Then he carries the box up the stairs to his apartment, because the elevator’s broken, yet again. He opens the door, gets inside, and _that’s_ when he stumbles, losing his balance and dropping the box and all its contents onto the carpet. Soil and broken mug pieces everywhere. Russ stays on his knees, arms aching, hands shaking with -- something. Anger, maybe, except that he doesn’t get angry, he’s not that kind of person. There’s this awful quiet that’s suffocating the whole place, the calm before a storm. Except that the storm is already upon him; he’s stuck in the eye of it, watching it rip his life apart.

In the dream that wasn’t a dream, he shot a guy in the back for smoking in public. Just emptied a clip right into him, in broad daylight, as people screamed and ran. It was easy. That’s one problem. He’d do it again. That’s another. He’d do it to his boss if they’d let him back into the building. One more problem, with feeling.

“I’m a good person,” says Russ, to what remains of his potted plant. It was starting to die anyway. Maybe he can still replant it, but it won’t be what it was. “I’m _good._ The voice is the one that’s bad.”

Yeah, he thinks. That checks out. He cuts his finger on a shard of what used to be his mug; he holds it under cold water at the kitchen sink, waiting for his hand to turn numb, for the water to run clear down the drain.

* * *

It comes back to him in echoes, what he can’t remember and what he’d rather forget. He falls asleep that night thinking about the way that guy looked at him -- the guy on the bench in the striped shirt, the one he thought was the voice for a moment. Russ is a good, upright citizen. He knows that, he’s always known that, and yet that guy looked at him the way people look at the homeless people who talk to seagulls down at the waterfront. There are way worse things to feel awful about here. He shaves the next morning, stares himself down until his eyes start to water. If he’s going to wallow, he could at least wallow properly, about the right things.

There was blood on the sidewalk. Slick and red and visceral, leaking from dead flesh slumped on the ground. The air reeked of garbage and sweat, but when doesn’t it do that here? People are dead. Any day now the cops are going to knock on his door. Russ doesn’t get out of bed for two days, doesn’t open the windows or the curtains, startles awake at every footstep in the hallway outside. Maybe he’s dying. Maybe there’s still soil on the carpet, and it’s growing things, life putting down roots where it shouldn’t. Maybe the voice really was his conscience, and the only mistake he made was not finding some kind of outlet before.

The only mistake other than literally killing a guy. Several guys. His mind glances off them the way the bullets didn’t.

The cops don’t show. One week later, an e-ticket lands in his inbox: a one-way flight to the Himalayas, booked in his name, although he doesn’t remember ever booking a vacation. He can’t afford a vacation, is the real difficulty here -- except that a quick look at his bank account doesn’t turn up any flight-related charges, and the ticket very definitely contains all the right personal information. It’ll get him to what looks like a nature reserve, up in the mountains. You get to drive around in a little buggy, look at the animals, live in authentic local accommodation. The photos on their website are all skies and silhouettes, brilliant streaks of colour like paint. If he could just get out of the city. The whole valley is in the grip of a heatwave, bleaching by degrees under the unforgiving sun; there’s no colour here, and maybe there never was. Russ can’t think straight anymore. Every voice on the street below is a danger. And -- well. He’s always wanted to ride an elephant.

It was booked in his name, he tells himself, as he wrestles a suitcase downstairs, hails a taxi, taps his fingers on his thighs all the way to the airport. It’s not bad to accept a gift. When the plane leaves US airspace at last, when the little seatbelt light blinks out overhead, Russ takes the first real breath of his life.

* * *

He opens the cabin door, drinks in the sight of mountains and trees and sky. The air is clearer here. The sun’s just about to set; the clouds are lit up purple and pink, and all Russ can hear is the faint song of the crickets, the breeze in the long grass. It will be all right here. He’ll get his head on straight again, rediscover himself, figure out who he is when he has space enough to think. Nobody is going to smoke outside the window here. He won’t even _want_ to shoot anyone. What would a gunshot even sound like, here in the mountains, in a silence as vast as this?

“Russell,” croons the voice. It sounds the way a finger down his spine might feel. “Russell -- where have we _come,_ Russell?” -- and he knows, suddenly. Or he can imagine. It rings out with such perfect clarity in his head.


End file.
